


Pony League

by Trapelo_Road475



Category: Emergency!
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-08-20
Updated: 2013-08-20
Packaged: 2017-12-24 02:13:54
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,807
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/933976
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Trapelo_Road475/pseuds/Trapelo_Road475
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Hank loved the idea of being a fireman, as much as he loved baseball.  And he knew, without question, that you couldn’t be a fireman or love baseball if you fell in love with other boys.</p><p>...</p><p>Hank Stanley, rookie fireman, his first posting, and his first Captain.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Pony League

Hank loves baseball.

The thing of it is, he’s not very good at it.

Sure, he grew up playing it, just like every other boy in the country, whether it’s stickball in the cities or scrub-land games with 10 outfielders like pinpricks against the deep heat-tremble of the horizon. Hank grew up somewhere in between. 

The thing was, he was shy. Quick with the glove and he could slam a ball over the fence like it was nothing, but he was shy, took a while to warm up to the other boys, was never quite like them. Then he hit his growth spurt hard, shooting up like a weed and he was all clumsy legs and swinging arms and feeling like he was a puppet someone had strung together from spare parts. He was too old for the sandlot games and too awkward for the school teams or the pony league. Everyone told him he ought to play basketball, with his reach and the spring in his step. 

Hank hated basketball. If he wanted to trot up and down the gym for a couple of hours, he could do that in phys. ed. 

It didn’t help that, along with the too-big hands and the too-long legs and the voice that kept cracking at all the worst times (the voice that didn’t settle properly until he was in the service), there came the thoughts about girls, and even worse and even secret, the thoughts about the other boys.

It wasn’t all the time. It wasn’t most of the time. But it was sometimes. There was a younger bachelor in his neighborhood that he did chores for most weekends, for a little pocket money and lunch, and Hank fell in love with him a little sideways like he did with Betty Caruso, who was a junior with large, loose dark curls and the prettiest eyes. Fell in love like he didn’t know what to do with it, and he didn’t.

Hank was a nice boy. He helped out the bachelor (Mickey, that was his name. Mickey DeMoulas) on weekends and at school he blushed whenever Betty Caruso looked his way.

He still loved baseball. He listened to the games on the radio every chance he got, even stayed up late tuning the AM this way and that, looking to see if he could catch one out of Chicago or even Boston or New York. 

One time Mickey asked him, over lunch (which he devoured like a flight of locusts, and Mickey didn’t mind he just laughed and shook his head), what he thought he wanted to be when he grew up.

"My dad’s in the service," he’d mused, a strangely honest answer coming to his lips (he could never answer his teachers that way, "I suppose I’ll … I’d like to be a fireman, I think."

He’d always liked the sound of that. He’d always liked the roar of the engines coming around a curve, the wail of the siren, he’d always liked the idea he might knock down a monster. Maybe rescue a few kittens out of trees.

Mickey had nodded and told him, you keep yourself up in school, Henry, and I suspect you can do about anything you like.

Hank loved the idea of being a fireman, as much as he loved baseball. And he knew, without question, that you couldn’t be a fireman or love baseball if you fell in love with boys, if you were one of those perverts, sex fiends.

He knew it, and he set his mind.

He did his time in the service, and by the time he was out and his voice was finally done breaking and his bones were finally done aching with growth he was tall - taller than most anybody he knew - and agile and strong in spite of still being stick-thin, and even more determined.

(in the army, one strange and drunken night, he’d shared hands and breaths with another soldier, whose name he can’t remember, only that he was a farmboy, blond and tanned, with eyes like water. Hank was determined. It was only one night.)

His first tour out of the academy, they sent him to 68s, right in the thick of all the action. His Captain was a fellow named Tom McConnike, a head shorter, built like a fire hydrant, and the kind of man to ride them hard, but with enough experience to know when to lay off, when they'd had a long shift, a rough shift. 

Hank was a little in love with him. 

One night, in late summer, some fools torched an abandoned warehouse, and the sky lit up and in the twilight turned strange and sickly red, the sun trembling low on the horizon like a rheumy eye. They were looking and looking for people trapped, in the sprawling complex, listening over the hiss and the roar for human sounds, for something, for anything. Hank had the line tight and fat and live as the fire, and he had Brett Trenton's back right where he could lay a hand on it. Ate smoke half the night. A section of ceiling cracked and came down on him and on Brett, and Cap had them sit the rest out, both of them coughing up soot and Hank feeling guilty for not being in there, not being back there among the flames. He felt very young then, soaked in sweat and hosewater. He watched his Cap barking orders and casting glances at him and Brett and a couple others from another station to make sure they didn't get it into their heads to go back inside.

Hank watched his Cap and thought, come on, put me back in, I can do it. I'll do it. 

It took them hours to get the fire knocked down, and the only mercy was three hours of blank and blessed sleep before an alarm rang to send them off to an early-morning kitchen fire, smoke and ruined eggs and bacon, a fluttering, frantic housewife and an apologetic man in a bathrobe. It was wake-up time, coffee-time, when they got back, and Hank could see his shift-mates moving heavy under their coats, as if their bones and their lungs hurt too. And he didn't feel quite so guilty.

Hank meant, after breakfast (which hurt to eat - the smoke still rancid and black in his throat, his nose) to head to his beat-up truck and head back to his beat-up apartment and lay his beat-up body down and not wake up until next shift. But he climbed to to the roof instead, just to sit, just to watch the city breaking into its ordinary day.

He hadn't thought Cap would follow him. He hadn't thought he'd welcome the company. He hadn't known quite what to think. He was a little in love with Tom McConnike, and he knew it was wrong. 

McConnike didn't say much. The sun was already hot. 

"That was a tough 'un, wasn't it?"

Hank nodded. His eyes hurt. He needed a shower, he needed to brush his teeth. "I'd've gone back, if you'd let me - "

"Son," McConnike said, "you're no good to anybody dragging a line around hurt."

Something young and headstrong in him wanted to say it wasn't hurt, he'd hardly even felt it through his turnouts. But he just nodded. 

"Hank, I've been thinking ... " 

"Yeah, Cap?"

"You're a heckuva firefighter, for a rookie, yannow."

"Thanks, Cap."

Tom McConnike laid a hand on his arm, and said, "Hank, how's bout you and I go get some real coffee?" 

Hank looked at Cap's eyes, and they had that strange and indecipherable look of his army buddy, in the dark, when he pulled back and licked his lips and said hey, pal, you ready? 

At Cap's house (a tidy, unassuming ranch house with a postage-stamp yard and a stunning view of three exact-same ranch houses and a highway), Cap touches his back as if to guide him and he turns and he says, "Cap?" 

And Cap touches his arm again and he's done for, just done for, must be the smoke drying out his tongue like sandpaper, catching the roof of his mouth. "Call me Tom," he says. 

Five minutes later with Cap's hands tight around his wrists he's making soft noises that sound far too much like steam escaping overheated wooden beams. Like a fire. 

"Hank," Cap says, "now I don't want you to feel put-on or anything, son - "

Hank would do anything Cap wanted. He'd have gone right back into that fire for him. He'd have eaten smoke until he sweat it out his pores. It's what you do, for your brothers, what you do, for your Cap. It's what he'd do for a man with hard words and kind eyes that he's a little bit in love with no matter how wrong it is. 

Hank lets himself lie down on Cap's bed. He lets Cap take his clothes off - shirt wide open, undershirt hiked up, his jeans suddenly unzipped. He lets Cap touch him like he'd let any pretty girl, except Cap's hands are hard like his buddy in the service, they're warm and they're steady. Hank lets Cap take him in his mouth which makes him cry out, rough, coughing again, gasping back his breath, gasping while Cap kisses his stomach and soothes him around the ribs.

"Nobody ever did that," Hank rasps, and Cap kisses his chest again.

"Well lie down then."

Hank's never felt anything like it. Mouth on his prick. It was all hands, in the Army. All fumbling, with the two or three girls he's been with. Cap knows what he's doing. Hank will let him do anything - 

Cap ("Call me Tom, alright?") brings him off faster than he's ever gotten to it before, except when he was just a teenager, and just about everything set him off. 

"Cap - Tom - " 

"Shh."

Through his haze - exhaustion, arousal, release - Hank's brain marks the sloppy, fleshy sounds of Cap touching himself, and the low groan in his ear, and the hot spatter of semen on his stomach. Cap presses his mouth (Hank refuses to let his brain call it a kiss) to the side of Hank's neck, tells him to rest. Tells him it's alright. 

Hank lies on his Captain's bed and stares at the stuccoed ceiling and thinks about baseball. Lets his eyes fall heavy. Thinks of baseball. Bobby Preston, their engineer, was just talking the other day about the pickup games they have with a few of the other stations, how every year they pick the best of the lot of them and have a fundraiser. Bobby had been asking him if he played at all, and Hank had said - well then the alarms had gone ringing, and they'd both forgotten all about the question. He thinks now he might tell Bobby yeah, he plays. He wouldn't have, before. He thinks of baseball and fog over the sandlot on a late spring morning and playing in the rain until the mud churned up so thick you couldn't tell what was dirt and what was the ball, or what was a base and what was a boy arguing he was safe. 

Hank fell asleep on his Captain's bed, thinking about baseball, and being a fireman, and not thinking about the churning in his belly or the fear lying in wait like a rattler at the bottom of his mind, about what he'd done, what he'd been, what he was. What he could be.

. . .

They didn't talk about it. Cap would remind him, he didn't need to feel put on, he could say no, there wasn't any shackle holding him, no rule. Cap would treat him just the same if he decided one day he didn't like going back to Cap's place after a rough shift for a shower, for breakfast, for (goddamn say it, he thinks) sex.

Cap (Tom, Tommy sometimes) says to him one night with the curtains drawn, "You're getting to be a damned fine fireman, Hank." 

Hank just groans softly with Cap at his back, Cap rubbing against him, touching him. 

He feels like a pervert. He looks at Bobby and Brett, at Kenny St. Fleur and Tony DeLaurio, and wonders what's different, if they're different, if maybe one of them has a great big dirty secret like his. They're good firemen. Good brothers to have at his back. He likes to think he's good, too. Not just because Cap says so. Because Cap says so. Cap wouldn't lie. Even in bed with the curtains drawn, he wouldn't lie. About that. 

He's learning a lot, he truly is. He's learning the nuances of the engine, the beauty and strength of her. Bobby takes the time to try teaching him the different dials, how the pumps work. Brett has a head for maps and geography, always knowing where every call is and the best way to get there. (Brett also knows where all the good restaurants are, the nicest parks, the best places to wind down off-shift). Kenny is the best cook, at first barely trusting him with a knife and a bag of carrots, but beginning to introduce him to the fine art of recipes and flavor. And Tony - big Tony DeLaurio, like an old firewagon horse come back to life as a man, the bravest son of a bitch on any shift Hank thinks. There is not a damned thing that scares him, and no injured person or beast that he does not treat with compassion.

Cap is still Cap. Fills him in on the little things and keeps him honest, keeps them all on an even keel before Kenny's jokes get too wild or before Tony has the station adopting a second or third dog in addition to maybe a cat or some fish. Captain McConnike is the pin, the balance.

And sometimes Hank goes home with him. 

Another day, another night, another day breaks and Cap (Tom, in bed) tries to teach Hank to suck him off. Hank feels like some trenchcoat wearing sex maniac the minute he goes to his knees on the soft, thick shag carpeting of Cap's bedroom. It's not even he doesn't like it. He's making Cap make those same sweet sounds, he's making Cap happy, making him feel like curling his toes like Cap always does to him. He does like it. He truly does. 

Cap had touched the back of his neck and smiled.

The next day, not knowing what he felt, but only determined, Hank (later explaining it as a prank, something gone awry, he hadn’t meant to do it, but that was bullshit and everyone knew it because Hank didn’t make those kinds of mistakes) took Tommy McConnike’s hat out back of the station, doused it in kerosene, and set it on fire. 

Hank was not really sure why. Only that the curling flames and the smoke was like a sacrifice or a message, like some man lost on a deserted island, trying to signal a passing ship. Only that turning Cap's pristine white dress hat to char and ash meant something important. It felt like a weight lifting off him that he hadn't noticed before, not unlike getting back from a fire and shucking turnouts. 

Bobby had whistled softly when he saw it. Kenny had said nothing and slunk back into the kitchen to make dinner. Brett had laughed. Tony had laid a hand on his shoulder and tightened his mouth and his big dark eyes as if to ask, kid, are you alright?

Cap had torn a real stripe off him, and suspended him (exiled him) for two weeks. He'd had to go before the Battalion Chief and lie through his teeth about it being a prank, he hadn't exactly meant the whole hat to go up. He said (per Bobby's advice and Kenny's agreement) that Kenny had dared him to do it, had promised him that this bottle of something would fireproof anything. That, he told the Captain, and the Battalion Chief, and eventually the Chief himself, and he'd taken his punishment (a maddeningly long suspension and a pay docking and after that, about three straight weeks of latrine duty) and that was that.

Cap didn't ask him to go home with him anymore.

It was spring, though. And Bobby started asking about baseball again. And Hank sure liked that idea. 

It turned out, he wasn't very good at it. But the only one of them who was, was Brett, who could play just about any position and good pitch a fastball like it was on fire. But it turned out, it didn't matter. It wasn't little league or pony league, it was sandlot, fireman baseball, playing off-shift, or a little catch out back until the alarms rang. And he did sure like that.


End file.
